


Milo Tealeaf, Lander Brightwood, & the Battle at the End of the Universe

by AndThatWasEnough



Series: Marlboro 'Verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, American Literature, Castiel and Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester are Jack Kline's Parents, Characters play D&D, Cigarettes, Crash Course, Dean Winchester is Good With Children, Dean Winchester is a huge nerd, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Domesticity in the Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Education, Episode: s14e10 Nihilism, Gen, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy References, Jack Kline gets a damn education, Jack Kline is a Winchester, Literature, Reading is fun kids, Sam and Cas are trying their best, Season/Series 14 Spoilers, Slice of Life, Smoking, Terminal Illnesses, allusion to eventual terminal illness, and math, and nerds out with Dad #3, with John Green, ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 03:25:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThatWasEnough/pseuds/AndThatWasEnough
Summary: What started as a productive way to keep Jack from using his powers morphed into him and Dean spending all their free time playing Dungeons & Dragons with a campaign that's essentially "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fanfiction.  But hey - if the kid's gonna know Twain and Alcott and Fitzgerald and how to play the piano, he sure as hell better know Douglas Adams, too.





	Milo Tealeaf, Lander Brightwood, & the Battle at the End of the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to part two of four of the Marlboro 'Verse, a canon-divergent AU of events post-14.10, but it does allude to the possibility of actual canon events...if that makes sense. You might want to give part one, "Marlboro Man", a read before jumping into this one because there are several allusions to the plot it sets up. Be warned: I've been told it's sort of a tearjerker? But they are necessary tears! All in the name of context.
> 
> Also, please forgive me for my limited knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons. I really, really don't know much about it, and my friend helped me out and pointed me to "Fantasy High" for help, so I did my research and did the best I could.
> 
> This part is sort of a love letter to learning. Is that weird? I don't know. I don't care! I suggest you just go with it.
> 
> Happy reading :)

**I.**

_“We have two lives... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.”_

Bernard Malamud, _The Natural_

xXx

It starts innocuously enough, like most things.  But then again, most events in their lives cannot be described as starting “ _innocuously enough”_ , so this is actually a bunch of horse shit and needs to be stricken from the record.

It starts with a roar, and a flash of golden light, and the slowing of time, and then – finally – with a bang.

xXx

It starts with Jack.

xXx

“He’s going to ruin himself for selfless reasons.  If we ever had any doubts he’d fit in with this family, I think we can lay them to rest now.”

Sam and Dean both smiled, but it wasn’t exactly the most positive thing.  Also?  Kind of a dig, but at all three of them, at least.  This was what they spent their evenings talking about, and Sam wondered if this was what normal parents of normal kids did – just sat around talking about them instead of about their own lives.  But what did Sam even have to talk about that wasn’t their jobs?  True crime?  _The West Wing?_ Politics?  Sam had a fake ID to vote, but Cas and Dean were pretty apathetic towards the whole thing.  Dean sighed and tapped his cigarette into his ashtray before going back in for another drag.  It was hard getting used to this habit again, but Cas had assured Sam that he would keep himself and Jack protected from the effects of the secondhand smoke, which barely comforted Sam in this situation. 

“So what’s the plan?” Dean asked.  “The kid wants to hunt – it’s his instinct.”

“Ya know, we _are_ in charge here,” Sam reminded his brother, and Cas, too.  “We don’t get to just pick and choose when we act like parents – the real ones don’t.”

“The _real ones?”_ Cas repeated, sounding a bit hurt, and Sam held up an apologetic hand.

“Sorry, sorry.  That’s…that’s not what I meant.  I meant…maybe _normal_ ones, who go about all this the normal way.  But…just because Jack is powerful – or can be - doesn’t mean that there aren’t boundaries.”

“So…you wanna ground him or something?  Like indefinitely?” Dean looked as if he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of reigning in the son of an archangel.  Cas looked thoughtful.

“Well, it’s not like there aren’t boundaries already,” he said, looking between the brothers.  “And he’s usually cooperative, even if they’re upsetting.”  He sighed.  “We need to find something.  I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him further endangering his soul.  It’s…it’s everything that he is.  It’s everything he has left, his life force…he can’t afford – “

“Yeah,” Sam sighed.  “We just…need to find a way to distract him, or something.”

“Eh, babies ain’t hard to distract,” Dean shrugged.  “We’ll find somethin’.”

xXx

Well.  Cas did.

xXx

_It’s beautiful, really, to see what Jack is truly capable of, but in the most terrifying way.  He could bring both the mountain **and** Mohammed without breaking a sweat.  It’s an act that comes from deep within himself, literally from his soul, and while they appreciate not being dead and all, appreciate him getting rid of the supercharged monsters, it’s still a problem._

_“You cannot burn off any more of your soul for us!” Cas scolds.  He feels the frustration, the hurt, the near betrayal of the young man he considers a son disobeying him, and on something of such import.  This is no small measure of defiance.  Jack’s hands curl and uncurl into fists, his eyes well up, he is confused and frustrated and scared and wants desperately to help._

_“I don’t know what else to do!” He cries.  “I don’t know!”_

xXx

Nothing, they all slowly come to realize.

He shouldn’t have to lift a finger for them.

xXx

Several old ladies in town were particularly fond of Cas.  The kids thought he was kind of weird, and most (but not all) townsfolk favored one brother over the other, and some people barely knew who they were.  But Cas had gradually made friends with not only Marta at the post office (though, if you held her at gunpoint and asked her to pick, she’d have to pick Dean), but Rita at the hardware store, and Lillian at the beauty parlor where Sam got his shampoo, and Gertie the sweet cashier at the grocery store.  Yes, Cas is a hit with ladies fifty-five-plus, and he uses it to his advantage.

Well.  In his own socially awkward, completely innocent way.

Lillian knows right away there’s something on his mind, and she’s got an ear for gossip, so when he goes in to pick up Sam’s hair products for him, she levels him with a steely gaze and points her scissors at him.  “Somethin’s eatin’ at you.”

“You’re right,” Cas reluctantly admits.  “Jack has been…misbehaving.”

Lillian smiles knowingly.  “I knew it.  Boys that age, they’re all the same.  Too grown-up for their parents, too little to know what in the hell they s’posed to do with themselves.  It’s an awkward stage.  For us all.”

Rita tells him the same thing when he goes to pick up the WD-40 Dean needs.  She’s very no-nonsense and says, “A boy like that, even a sweet one like him?  Needs discipline.”  He doesn’t say anything about how Jack isn’t exactly the most normal boy, that he looks eighteen but is really a toddler, and sometimes acts accordingly.

“I’m not much of a disciplinarian,” Cas sighs defeatedly.  “We try, but it’s been getting harder.”

“It always gets harder.  It gets harder and harder, especially once they’re gone.  They suddenly think they’re the shit and know exactly what the hell they’re doin’.  But they don’t.”

Cas wants to believe that Jack would always ask for help when he needed it, but then he thinks back to the fall, of him falling sicker and sicker and not telling a soul, not asking a one of them for help.  He genuinely probably didn’t know, didn’t understand what was happening, but he _must_ have known what he had gone through hadn’t been normal.  Right?

Right?

xXx

Gertie’s the one who plants the seed when Cas finishes his errands by picking up a few groceries and a carton of Marlboro’s for Dean.  Cas enjoys her gentle soul immensely, and often accidently lingers when in her checkout line, sometimes making for an awkward situation if there are people behind him.  Gertie doesn’t seem to mind all that much, though.

“Where’s Jack?”  Jack usually liked to tag along.

“I think he’s upset with me,” Cas admitted to her.  “All of us, actually.  He’s been avoiding us.”

Gertie nods thoughtfully as she rings up the groceries, and grabs Dean’s cigarettes without Cas even having to ask – she has an extremely good memory.  “Sometimes they need their time,” she shrugged.  “And then sometimes, they need to be drawn out.  My grandson is a good-natured type like Jack is – sometimes what it takes is an olive branch.”

xXx

Since nights were sleepless for Cas, they gave him ample time to think.  Mostly his thoughts were preoccupied with Jack, and this concept of extending an olive branch; an action to promote peace.  What they were looking for mainly, though, was a distraction.  Something to keep Jack occupied, something to take his mind off of the dangers that inhibit him to use his powers and weaken his soul.  That was the aim here. 

Cas got on Google.

The internet always had so many wonderful ideas.

The first few searches were pretty futile, and Cas learned pretty quickly that just typing ‘ _parenting’_ into the search engine wasn’t going to get him anywhere.  And then he started thinking about how Lillian said that boys his age never knew what to do with themselves, the awkwardness, and he wondered what the other kids in this town did.  Dean said they partied sometimes – Cas didn’t think that was a good idea.

But there was a rec center.

**II.**

_“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.  ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’”_

  1. Scott Fitzgerald, _The Great Gatsby_



xXx

The hardest part, Jack reflected, was wanting so desperately to help and only having one way to do it.

Jack knew he was pretty much useless without his powers.  He just hadn’t been an effective hunter as a human, and he knew what he was doing was dangerous, but what was he supposed to do when they were being threatened?  Just stand there?  He’d be even more useless if he had the ability to do something that could help and he didn’t use it.

They might as well just not take him on hunts anymore if they were so…so _damn_ worried about it.

xXx

Saying swear words even just in his head felt weird sometimes.

xXx

A knock on his door, and Cas saying, “Jack.”

Jack knew that regardless of whether or not he told him to go away, Cas was going to come in, whether he liked it or not, so in lieu of saying _any_ thing, he said nothing, and sat on his bed with his back pressed against the wall and his knees pulled tightly to his chest, awaiting.  (Sam had told him that the word ‘ _awaiting_ ’ was usually followed by some other words, as in ‘ _awaiting his fate_ ’, otherwise you were just supposed to say ‘ _waiting’,_ but what was the fun in that?)  And as he suspected, Cas came in just a few short moments later, but when Jack dared to look up at him, he didn’t seem angry, or even upset.  He seemed content in that very neutral way of his, and he was holding something.

“What?” Jack mumbled, not wanting to convey his curiosity.  He wanted Cas to know he was still upset.  Cas finally smiled – or, well, more like smirked, but you get the idea.  He sat on the edge of the bed, and Jack tried to get a closer look at what was in his hand.

“I’ve been thinking recently,” Cas began, “about your education.”

Jack narrowed his eyes.  That hadn’t gone where he’d expected.  “My education?” Jack repeated.  “My education about what?”

“Well” – Cas spread his hands – “everything.”

The way Cas explained it, a young man simply could not get by in this world without a proper education – or, as proper an education as he could get.  Oh, maybe it was an antiquated idea, to believe a person was not wholly complete without one because he could certainly be a wreck even _with_ one, but the more educated you were, the more your mind opened to all the possibilities of the universe, and even when your mind is open to all, the fantastic thing was that you would never have the time to discover all these secrets, which meant that every person on the earth each knew something that someone else did not, and that was really something beautiful.  However, the only way to share in this beauty was to start on the path; to follow down the road and see where it led, find the way that had been pathed by others before us, and see the ways in which we can build upon it.  After all, our own education truly benefited others at the end of the day, and that was why did it – to share that knowledge.

Jack was intrigued.

It helped that Cas always spoke in such beautiful prose.

“But how am I supposed to do that?” Jack asked.  “Do I go to school?”

“Oh, not here,” Cas shook his head.  “Though maybe someday, to college – like Sam.  He has a degree from Stanford.  He was pre-law, he tells me, but his undergraduate degree was in English composition and literature.”  English composition and literature.  There was something so wonderful about the sound of that.  So rich and full, so all-encompassing.  “But I’ve put together a ‘game plan’ of sorts.  A mixture of what many consider to be homeschooling and classes at the rec center.”

“The rec center,” Jack repeated.  “They teach classes?  I thought it was just a gym.”

“Oh, no.  No, there are many classes listed in their literature.”  And Cas handed Jack the pamphlets that had been in his hand, and Jack started leafing through them.  “This is a very good opportunity, I think.  To expand your mind.  To learn new skills just because you _can_.  What do you think?”

xXx

What did Jack think?

.

.

.

Oh, well Jack thought it was wonderful.

xXx

It felt almost too easy.  Cas had expected a fight – but perhaps catching him off-guard with the suggestion without a mention of his powers or his soul helped to make him believe this was a separate concern.  Sam and Dean both breathed a sigh of relief at the diversion, even if it was only temporary.  In the meantime, Jack enthusiastically perused the rec center catalogue of classes.  It served four small towns just like Lebanon, so it actually had several resources, and wasn’t too far a drive. 

There were cooking classes, classes that taught you how to program, classes that taught you how to use something called Microsoft office, classes that taught you needlework and knitting and crochet, classes that taught you how to make art and music.  Jack highlighted every single one he found to be even the least bit interesting, which was most of them.  Cas told him maybe pick two for now – they did have to get him there after all, and needed the time for it.

The second part of Cas’s plan was a little more self-involved, the self being him, and probably Sam, and maybe even Dean sometimes, if he were feeling up to it.  He took up research again, finding reading lists and lessons on American history.  He felt he was up to the task of math and science, being an angelic being that had existed for almost all time, after all.  He was a bit disappointed to find that the Letters’ library was seriously lacking in fiction, however, and Sam agreed with him, since most kids liked stories, not…volumes upon volumes on identifying supernatural beings.

“I used to have so many books,” Sam said to him, shaking his head and huffing that strange laugh of his, the one that meant he was….sort of sad.  “In college.  With Jess.  Not one of them about hunting.”  He set the latest volumes about angelic possession on the library table.  “They’re the best thing to fill an apartment with.  At least people will think you’re smart.”

Sam _was_ smart, though.

xXx

“That Cas – he’s a card, ain’t he?”

Sam just shook his head at his brother.  He lingered in Dean’s doorway, trying not to make a face at the smell of nicotine and smoke.  It was still something he was getting used to – Dean wasn’t even smoking just then.  It was just starting to linger around him, and Sam remembered being in elementary, junior high, high school smelling those same smells.  It made him feel like a kid.  Tons of people still smoked back then, but this was 2019, and his brother smelled like a trailer park or something.  Sometimes, Sam really hated the universe.

“It’s a good idea,” Sam said pointedly, not unkindly, mind you.  “What, like you’d come up with anything?”

“No,” Dean shrugged.  “You know me – stupid ideas left and right.”

Sam sighed.  Dean stared.  Eye to eye as Dean sat on his bed and took off his shoes, lifted his feet up onto the bed so he could get under the covers, shoved a couple pillows behind his back.  Never taking his eyes off his little brother.  Never.

Not yet.

xXx

“What do you think of these two?”

Cas looked at Jack’s final selections: piano and watercolors.  They were good choices – Cas had advised he might choose something that he couldn’t learn at home.  Cas was actually fairly decent at drawing, but painting had alluded him over the centuries.  He smiled at Jack and nodded.

xXx

“You are very lucky to have this opportunity, you know, as unorthodox as the method is.”

Jack looked at one of his fathers, confused.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean that some people have a hard time with becoming educated, formally or informally.  Take Sam and Dean, for instance – Sam enjoyed school enough that he kept with it, and planned to continue further.  Dean suffered at the system’s hands, and had to drop out.  Of course, their own lives were a factor, but everyone learns differently.  The American education system suited Sam – but perhaps not Dean, even if he attained his high school degree at a later time.”

“You can do that?”  Cas nodded.  And Jack thought.  And wondered if that could be possible for him.

**III.**

_“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”_

J.D. Salinger, _The Catcher in the Rye_

xXx

One thing became quickly evident: Jack loved to read.

Cas had discovered something called “Advanced Placement English Composition and Literature”, and that got Jack excited because that was the exact thing Sam had majored in at school.  The duo found a very long, very _thorough_ list that the curriculum used to suggest readings to its students, so that’s what they mostly drew from.  Jack wasn’t exactly familiar with any of the titles, and Cas wasn’t very well acquainted with many modern classics, so, you guessed it – more research.  That’s what lead them to go to the nearest Barnes and Noble to spend what Cas thought was a bit too much money on the American classics _The Natural, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,_ and _Gone with the Wind._ It was a start, at least (and quite a start at that.)

“ _Je_ sus, _Mar_ y, and _Jeff Bridges_ ,” Dean gawks when he sees the stack, “how many pages is that?”

Jack pulled his stack of books closer to himself.  “It’s a lot of pages, and Cas and I picked them out together.  Have _you_ read any of them?”

Dean squinted at him.  Jack thought he looked practically disgusting with that mean look on his face, his skin already started to turn leathery and more wrinkled from the smoke, and smoking was exactly what he was doing just then, wafting in front of his face.  This Dean was…Jack didn’t think he really liked this version of Dean yet.  Cas and Sam seemed used to him, but Jack just wasn’t there yet.

xXx

Late at night, Jack would stay up in his room with his covers pulled up over his head, flashlight in hand and a book in his lap, mouthing silently along with the words, carefully flipping each page and making sure to not damage any of his new books in any way, and he certainly didn’t lick his fingers to turn the pages – that was something Sam and Dean did, and it was disgusting and would end up leaving gross little fingerprints on the paper.  _Gross_.  Jack wanted to protect his books at all costs, savor each word.

xXx

“Jack?  Go to sleep.”

xXx

“I guess bustin’ him reading is better than walking in on him jacking off.  Get it?  _Jack_ ing off?  Huh?”

“Shut up, Dean.”

xXx

Dean drove Jack to his first day of his piano class.  Sam had taken him to the first day of his watercolor class, and Jack had come home with a painting of a flower that Cas pinned up on the fridge and wouldn’t stop smiling about.  Jack knew it wasn’t all that good, but he was proud of it, and he liked the teacher, so he figured he’d keep going even though he wasn’t so great on the first try.  Sam said he could only get better, and Jack was pretty sure that Sam even got a little teary-eyed when Jack proudly presented his painting.

It seemed to Jack that Dean wasn’t quite as enthusiastic, and all he did was smoke while he drove, and Jack decided to keep this fact to himself, but he smelled pretty bad, like smoke and ash.  It reminded him of the bad lady who had tried to hurt him and his mother and Cas, how she went up in flames.

“I’ll come get you in an hour, okay?” Dean said, and Jack nodded, trying to hold his breath, which meant he also couldn’t risk talking, either.  “Okay.  Be good.”

Jack wasn’t quite sure why Dean felt he had to add that last part because of course Jack was going to be good.  He had to be good.

He had to be.

xXx

The teacher told Jack that he had perfect hands for playing the piano – long fingers that could stretch just over something called an octave, which Jack gathered meant the distance between two of the same note.  The piano class was a bit more confusing than the watercolor class; in the painting class, he was free to do whatever he wanted, use whatever colors he wanted, paint any of the objects that the teacher had set out that he wanted, use whatever brush that he wanted.  The only rules were that he had to use the specific watercolor paper and that he had to clean his brushes out when he was done so that they wouldn’t get screwed up.  Piano had so many more rules, and Jack didn’t understand at first why he didn’t just know how to play the songs he liked.  It turned out there was a proper way to sit and hold every part of your arms, from your shoulders to your wrists, and even though they were starting with something called the C Major scale, it turned out there were way more scales than that he would have to learn.  And when Jack opened up his book, he figured he’d just be able to look at the songs and understand how to play them right away, but the left hand was hard, and all he could figure out was the right hand, and that his thumb started on something called middle C and each of his fingers had a number one through five. 

It was a lot to process, and Jack had to take several deep breaths.  Sam had told him that when he got frustrated to just do what he did, which was to take a deep breath and count to ten as you slowly let it out. 

“It takes time,” the instructor told him kindly.  “You’re a beginner.  As with anything we want to get better at, it takes practice.”

Jack sighed a little.  He had heard that so much lately – he had to practice with his powers to learn how to control them, and then he’d had to learn how to do hand-to-hand combat and basic knife and firearm skills and just how to hunt in general, and it had taken forever to convince his dads to take him out into the field – but he figured it was just going to have to be something he got used to.  Adults loved repeating themselves, it seemed, and they all said the same thing, had all the same lines.  But Jack just grinned.

“Then I guess that’s what I’m going to do.”

xXx

Dean is late to pick up Jack.  He doesn’t know what he expected – Jack figures he’s probably finishing a cigarette.  As strange as Dean is now, Jack also feels bad for him.  He has to make himself really sick to save the world and kill Michael, and that just didn’t seem fair to Jack after everything Dean has done for that world, but it was either that or get everything destroyed.  Jack still didn’t like it, though.

Clutching his piano books tightly to his chest, Jack wandered around the rec center, getting further acquainted with the building and its going-ons.  It was dinnertime, so there weren’t as many classes going on right now as there was when watercolor class happened, which was at two in the afternoon, but there was a class where it looked like people were acting things out, and a cooking class (which reminded Jack that he was getting hungry and that Dean needed to hurry the heck up), and a group of guys playing a game of basketball.  Sam and Dean liked a team called the Kansas Jayhawks – they were a college team, so Sam had told him that they played other sports besides basketball, but Dean said those other sports didn’t count because they either weren’t any good at them or they were lame.

“Go ahead and do a charisma check.”

Jack stopped, and peered into the room.  There were five people sitting around a table, sheets of paper in front of them and a lot of colorful pieces of…plastic?  The person at the head of the table has some sort of visor in front of him, and one of the people at the table picks up one of what Jack has now discerned to be die and rolls it, and then another.  The person announces, “Uh…that’s a twelve.”

The man behind the visor looks thoughtful for a moment.  “You’re able to convince the guard to let you through, but there’s a chance he’s onto you.  I’d tread carefully from here on out.”

“Duly noted.”

Jack doesn’t mean to, but he keeps watching.  They seem to be playing some sort of game, but not like the ones that he played at home, not like the board games, even if they did have dice – not regular dice, though.

“You need something, buddy?”

Jack startled.  “No!” He said quickly.  He felt awkward.  “Uh.  I was just wondering what game you’re playing.”

A kid in a beanie tilted his head.  “You’ve never heard of Dungeons and Dragons?”

Jack falters.  “What’s Dungeons and Dragons?”

A dangerous question, indeed.

xXx

Dungeons and Dragons, Jack learned, was something called a tabletop roleplaying game, where you pretended to be a character that had special skills and went on adventures.  It was confusing at first because there was no board, and the pieces were little figurines that the guys had painted themselves, and why did the dice need more than six sides?  And who was this elusive dungeon master?  All was explained, very patiently, and with a lot of enthusiasm. 

“How do the characters go on adventures if you don’t move any of your pieces?” Jack wondered.

“You do,” the dungeon master, a guy named Bill, said.  “But we’re just starting this campaign, so we’re sort of…laying the foundations, getting to know the characters.”

“Bill’s a great dungeon master,” the kid in the beanie, Eliot, grinned.  “He does a ton of great voices for all the different characters he has to play.”

Jack nodded in thoughtful understanding.  “So what’s the adventure?”

“ _They_ don’t know yet,” Bill grinned.  Another one of the guys, Liam, scoffed.

“Dude.  C’mon.  If it’s anything like the last one, it’s gonna be another Douglas Adams-inspired wet dream.”

“Hey - !”

“There you are!”

Jack spun around at the sound of Dean’s hoarse voice – he’d definitely been finishing a smoke.  He didn’t look upset, though; he actually looked relieved he’d finally found Jack, which made Jack feel a bit bad.  Dean might have thought he’d gone missing or had been hurt or…or who knows!  He waved a hand at Dean.  “Here I am.”

Dean came into the little rec room.  “Been lookin’ for ya.  What’s, uh…” He waved a hand.  “This?”

Jack looked at his new friends and down at the table, then back at Dean.  “Oh.  It’s Dungeons and Dragons.”

Dean’s eyes widen.  “Oh.”

Everyone’s staring at him, and Dean shuffles awkwardly.  Eliot watches him closely, like he might know him, but doesn’t say anything.  Alexander, who’s wearing a weird hat with elf ears (which Dean thinks is a little too on the nose), speaks up, though, bravely provoking Dean.  “Alright, get it over with.  Give us your worst, Zoolander.”

Jack tries to signal to Alexander that this is a bad idea, that Dean could snap Alexander in half without much of an effort, but instead, Dean just laughs.  “Uh.  What?  Kid, no.  Chill out.  Nothin’ wrong with D-‘n’-D.”  He leans in a little, playing at being a bit shy, and tells them in his best conspiratorial voice, “I actually, uh, have played a little before.”  He rolls back on his feet and shrugs.  “Ya know.  In high school.”

“Really?” Jack asks, and Dean nods. 

“Sure.  Wasn’t half bad at it either,” he winked, and Jack wondered just how the heck someone could get good at roleplaying.  Was it like acting? 

“Well, we’ve been showing Jack the ropes…” Bill gestures to the table.  “Wanna join us?”

Dean sticks out his bottom lip, shoves his hands in his pockets.  “If ya don’t mind.”

xXx

It quickly became evident that Dean had played more than a little Dungeons and Dragons in his time.  He pulled up a chair next to Jack and immediately started asking questions, wondering if he could get in on the action, and since Dean had a nat-20 in charisma, the gang was more than willing to let this middle-aged guy get in on their game.  They gave him a character sheet, Jack, too, and Dean started filling it out immediately, his character a human named Lander Brightwood, a fighter and a soldier.  He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, too, and would later tell Jack that he was revamping an old character of his.  Eliot helped Jack set up his character, using his as an example.

“Immeral Liadon is a high elf of the wizard class, from a long line of sages,” he explained haughtily, and Jack nodded. 

There was a lot to consider when it came to creating a character, Jack quickly learned, but everyone guided him through it, and eventually Jack had created a halfling named Milo Tealeaf, a cleric.  Whatever that meant, exactly. 

“Alright,” Bill clapped his hands together and smiled at the group gathered before him.  He looks to the four players that had already started the game before Dean and Jack got there and began, “The four of you are sitting in your booth when a man named Lander Brightwood and his companion Milo Tealeaf approach you in the restaurant at the end of the universe…”

xXx

“Who’s Douglas Adams?”

“An author,” Dean tells him as they’re driving home.  They ended up playing for another two hours, and everybody now knew each other and their characters, and when they met up again next week, they were going to get into a battle with some space mutants, and Jack could barely contain his excitement.  He had to wait a whole _week_ to battle the space mutants?  How could he wait so long?  “He wrote the _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ series.”  He laughs a little.  “Uh.  The restaurant at the end of the universe, where our characters were supposed to be, is actually the title of one of his books.”

Jack nods.  “You’ve read them.”

“Yep.”  Dean sighs.  “Ya know, Jack, great as everything that Sam and Cas have set up for you is – the classes, the books, the history lessons – there’s more to being educated than that.  Hell, I know I’m an idiot, but I’ve got my GED and I know _some_ things they don’t.  Ya know?  And Douglas Adams…”  He points at Jack without looking at him, “He’s someone you need to know.  I’m not a big reader like they are, but hell, man, you gotta know Douglas Adams.”

“Okay,” Jack says resolutely.  “I’ll read his books, too.”

“Good.”

There’s a pause.

“And, uh, I’m actually not too bad at math.”

Jack recognizes this for the olive branch that it is.  He takes it.

**IV.**

_“He was sunshine most always - I mean he made it seem like good weather.”_

Mark Twain, _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_

xXx

Every day after piano class, Jack would head for the rec room and then Dean would wander in after finishing his cigarette, and they’d play Dungeons and Dragons with their new friends.  It was their little secret, something just the two of them knew about.  Lander Brightwood and Milo Tealeaf and Co. were going to save the universe, one strategizing session over milkshakes at the restaurant at the end of the universe and one battle at a time. 

“Why can’t we tell anybody about it?” Jack asked Dean once as they were heading home.  He liked that they shared something that was just for the two of them, but he also wanted to tell Sam and Cas all about the adventures they were having, even if they weren’t real.

“No reason,” Dean shrugged.  “Just thought it might be nice to have a secret that wasn’t dangerous for once.”

xXx

Sam found something called Crash Course on YouTube, and had excitedly shown them to Jack, explaining that they were these overviews of subjects like US History and even the history of the whole entire _world_ and literature like the books he was reading and science and even the history of movies – just all sorts of subjects, and the best part was that they had these little cartoons in the middle of them, which were always Jack’s favorite part of the episode.  He loved the Thought Bubble. 

“They’re like summaries,” Sam explains.  “So remember how we were talking about Native Americans the other day?  There’s a video that gives you an overview of some of the nations, and how they lived here before settlers came.  And-and” – Sam was very excited about all of this.  He could barely get the words out.  He did this sometimes, when he was excited about something, the words just spilling out on top of each other as he tried to convey the information – “You’re reading _The Great Gatsby,_ and _Huck Finn,_ and _The Catcher in the Rye_ , and they have videos about all of those where they talk about the authors and the important themes, and isn’t that cool?  They’re really great.  And for the literature ones, you could read all the books they’ve done and then watch the videos so you really have a grasp on the story.”  Damn!  Jack was just going to be so _cultured_.  Sam’s excitement over something so simple was palpable, and nice.  Jack was glad he was happy about something that wasn’t lame, like being not dead or whatever.  “Have you read _Frankenstein?_ You need to read _Frankenstein._ ”

Jack lights up.  “Isn’t that about zombies?”

Sam teeters his head.  “…Kinda!”

Jack bolts up.  “We need to get to Barnes & Noble,” he announces, and Sam laughs and grabs his shirttail, pulling him back down gently.

“Slow down.  I have a copy, kiddo.”

xXx

Jack loves Barnes and Noble.  It’s like being in the bunker’s library, but all the books are new, and not necessarily about monsters.  There’s a small local bookstore in Lebanon, but it doesn’t have quite the selection, and it also sort of doubles as an antique shop, and Dean says going in there makes him itch, so the visits there are few and far between, and even though Barnes and Noble is a little farther away, it’s the more popular choice.  Sam and Cas usually go straight for the section with education books, sometimes using AP prep books to help Jack.  Jack likes the novel and fiction sections, and there’s something about the children’s section at the back of the store, with the rabbits and the big reading area with the rocking chairs and soft carpet that calls to him, but Sam tells him that’s for little kids and that Jack is beyond picture books.  Sometimes Jack wants to tell him that he _is_ a little kid.  Dean said that him going back there would make people think he was retarded, whatever that meant, and Sam said that was a mean word and that he should never use it.  Dean was just a little outdated sometimes.

xXx

But Dean had found D&D books at Barnes and Noble, and, well, Jack thought those were pretty cool.

xXx

“Can I do a perception check?”

“Go for it.”

Dean rolls; Jack studies him.  His fathers were good at many things, most obviously killing monsters and researching monsters and telling other people what to do, but there were other things as well.  Jack was learning this slowly, but with each new revelation, he felt a bit closer to them.  For instance, Cas knew everything about wildlife, especially flowers and bees.  Heck, he _loved_ bees.  He liked to go for walks, and Jack sometimes liked to go with him, and he would tell Jack all the scientific names for all the flora without even giving it a second thought.  And Sam, he loved reading just as much as Jack did, and learning things just for the heck of it.  He also loved fantasy movies, and he had a typewriter in his room that he told Jack he hoped to someday get more use out of.

Then there was Dean.

“Fifteen!” Dean says happily.

Bill thinks for a moment.  He was the thoughtful kind of person.  “Yeah, okay, so through the midst of the space-greaser, space-soc brawl, you see the soda jerk and the line cook have hopped over the counter and is making a run for the parking lot.”

“I go after them.”

“Wait, is the kitchen open?” Eliot asks.

“Uh…yeah!  Totally open.  The soda jerk and the line cook have made break for it, and Lander is going after them, so there is an opening for you to get in there.”

“I want to be cool and try to jump over the counter to get to the kitchen, too.”

Bill laughs.  “Yeah, do an acrobatics check.”

Eliot rolls, snorting with laughter.  “Nine.”

Everybody at the table laughs now, too.  “Okay, Immeral, you manage to get over the counter, but it’s pretty graceless and the girl from earlier totally saw you struggling.”

“’Kay great.  Awesome.”

“Milo, it’s you.”

Jack thinks for a minute.  Dean – and everybody at the table, for that matter – is really good at this game.  Jack is getting better, but he sometimes misses opportunities, and he wants to kick himself for it when that happens.  “Can I follow Lander?”

Bill nods.  “Yeah, he’s making for the parking lot, and you notice him and follow him outside.”

Dean watches Jack closely as he takes his turn, raising his eyebrows a couple times in approval.  What was Dean good at it?  Dean was good at making decisions.  He was good at Dungeons and Dragons.  He could handle any car. 

Dean was _cool_.

xXx

“How did you get so good at this?”

“What?  D&D?”

“Yeah,” Jack shrugs.  “You always think of things that I don’t.  How did you get so good?”

“I played it a lot – practice makes perfect, ya know.”

Jack sighs as Dean parks the car in the garage.  “Everybody says that,” he whines. 

“They say it cuz it’s true,” Dean says smartly.  “Clichés are clichés because everyone knows they’re the truth.  You play the piano to get better at it, right?  This is the same thing.”

As they head into the bunker, Jack asks, “Where did you learn, though?  I know you said you played some back in high school, but you’re too good to have just played a little.  Who did you play with?”

Turns out it’s a bit of a long story.  Sam was big on fitting in at school, wanted nothing more than to be normal, and did everything in his power to make that his reality.  It worked better in some places than others.  Dean wasn’t as concerned about these things, didn’t see the point, didn’t really like school, didn’t care about fitting in with the other kids.  There was one school in Ohio, though, that they were at for longer than usual, and that sort of forced Dean’s hand – the roguish outcast reputation got a little tiring after a while, apparently.  He can’t even quite remember how he fell in with the nerd crowd, but there was a group of guys that met at the back of a video store in the break room, and before long, Dean was playing with them. 

“At one point, there was a math teacher that found out about it, and he started playing with us.  Talk about a fuckin’ nerd.”

Jack narrowed his brow.  “Wouldn’t that make you a nerd?”

Dean smirked and flipped him off.  “Go to bed or something, kid, and save the smart comments.”

xXx

Jack took a shower.  He brushed his teeth.  He put on his pajamas and crawled into bed with his flashlight and _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.  It was his fourth book in a pretty short period of time, and he had _Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Gone with the Wind,_ and now _Frankenstein_ and the Hitchhiker’s series to get through.  It was a lot of work, but it had to be done – he had to become cultured and educated.  That was just how it was.

There was a knock on his door – Cas.  “Don’t stay up too late,” he tells him.  “Dean says you might be interested in math?”  Jack shrugs.  He never said that exactly, but if Dean was offering…. “You’d like to maybe start with that?”

“Sure.  Can Dean do it?  You and Sam, you’re already doing so much for me.”

Cas tilts his head towards him.  “Of course.  Hey, Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Why is it that the two of you get home so late after your piano class?”

Jack falters, not wanting to give away his first non-dangerous secret.  “I stay after and practice more.  I want to get better, and you have to practice to get better,” he says quickly, but he keeps spinning his yarn.  “Do you think I could get a piano of my own?  Or maybe a keyboard?  My teacher says those are good, too.”

Cas thinks about it for a moment.  “I’ll talk to Sam and Dean about it, but I don’t see why not.  Goodnight, Jack.”

“Night.”

Cas closes the door and leaves Jack enveloped in darkness.  He clears his throat and turns his flashlight on, training the beam on the pages.

xXx

The next day, Jack is woken up by a pounding on his door, and he knows it has to be Dean because only Dean ever pulled stunts like that.  “Rise and shine, kid!  I’ve got bacon and algebra waiting for ya!”

“Algebra?” Jack repeated, voice hoarse as he woke up.

“Yep!  Gotta find x, man!  Up and at ‘em!”

xXx

“Ya think this is working?”

Dean is relaxed.  He’s got bacon, he’s got a cigarette that he’s lazily bogarting, and he’s got an algebra book in his hand that Sam found.  Math just fucking made sense – Sam got all caught up in flowery language and the depths of history, and history could be cool, but words could be interpreted in too many ways.  Math was math.  There was generally one answer for everything, and besides shop, it was the only class Dean liked in school.

“Is what working?”

“This…distraction,” Dean waves a hand.  “You think this whole homeschool freak thing is helping?”

Sam snorts softly.  “Dude, Jack usually holes up in his room with a book or his videos for hours and that frees us up – I don’t think he even notices when we’re gone.  We haven’t even gone out that much lately.”  Sam shrugs – it was true.  They had noticeably slowed down – not stopped, but slowed down, waiting for…something.  No one wanted to say what the something was.  They all _knew_ what the something was, but in true Winchester fashion, they’re just avoiding thinking and talking about it.  Par for the course.  Sam smiles into his mug.  “We’re molding him into a cultured, intellectual elite.”

“Amazing.”

“Given our limited resources, I’d say so.”  Dean scowls, smacks the side of Sam’s head and he hisses.  “Dude!  What was that for?”

“You know what it was for.”

“That wasn’t a dig.”

“Felt like it.”

“If it was, it was towards all of us.  So, _yes_ , Dean, I’d say this ‘distraction’ is working, and that’s a good thing.  Don’t we all deserve to…to broaden our horizons in what little ways we can?”

Dean wants to snap back that Jack’s horizons are already pretty broad – he’s died and come back to life, after all, and is the son of the Devil and was once able to open portals to other worlds, but he supposes that’s neither here nor there.  “Yes,” he grumbles.  “I guess we do.”

Cas bursts into the kitchen, looking harried.  Sam and Dean come to attention, but all Cas has to say is, “We don’t have a piano, and Jack needs one.”

xXx

Algebra is hard, Jack realizes.  Since when was mixing letters and numbers suddenly a good idea? 

“So, look – you have x – 47 = 103.  Obviously, you subtracted forty-seven from _something_ to get one-oh-three, and that’s what x is going to be.  See what I mean?”

“But how do I find it?” Jack asks, not liking how whiny he was sounding, but he wasn’t even two years old yet – he figured he was allowed to whine if he wanted to.  He stares hard at the paper, then at the math book, avoiding looking at Dean because all of this was so _obvious_ to him and it wasn’t to Jack, and Jack hated that.  Good for Dean – he could find x.  Whoop-de-do. 

“Isolate x,” Dean said simply.  Oh, so simply.  “Watch.”  He grabs Jack pencil and for some reason _licks the end of it, the weirdo_ , and starts working the problem.  “You can make it so that you’ve got x on its own side.  You’re subtracting forty-seven from it, right?  So it’s like a negative-forty-seven, which means you add it to the other side like this…”  He adds a +47 under the -47 and then crosses them both out, then adds +47 to the other side, making the equation look like x = 103 + 47.  “And what’s one-oh-three plus forty-seven?”

Jack bites his lip in thought.  “One-fifty,” he finally says, and Dean nods.

“Good,” he murmurs.  “So…?”

“So…” Jack takes a deep breath, counts to ten, like always, lets it out.  “So…x is one-fifty?”

“Very good,” Dean says, and writes beneath the equation x = 150.  “See?  You did it.”

“It still doesn’t make sense,” he grumbles.  “There are supposed to be _rules_.  I thought math had rules.”

“It does.  This is one of them.”

Jack shakes his head.  The library is quiet around them, Sam on his laptop and Cas at one of the distant bookshelves.  They aren’t even paying attention to them.  “Why do you like this?”  Jack liked his books.  He liked his stories.  He was being too nice to Dean letting him teach them this stuff just because he liked it and had Michael trapped in his head and was going to die someday.  This was much too big a favor to compensate for those things.  Wasn’t letting him play Dungeons and Dragons with him enough?  “It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does, the more you do it.  I don’t know.  I like the rules.  Books, stories – they don’t have rules.”

“Sure they do,” Sam finally piped in.  “Stories have rules.  They’re just not as straightforward.”

“And that’s the problem!” Dean proclaims.  “I know the rules with this stuff.  I _like_ knowing the rules.”

**V.**

_“I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.”_

Louisa May Alcott, _Little Women_

xXx

The Universe had rules.  Lots of them, in fact.  Some of those rules weren’t to be known by its citizens, but some were pretty obvious.  Death and taxes were assured, a man with a great fortune must be in want of a good wife, every hitchhiker needed a towel, so on and so forth.

Rules get broken, though, which was a frustrating thing for the purveyors of this universe, but at least they could usually point to who was breaking them – reputations come before you, and all that.

xXx

Jack woke up coughing one morning.

He didn’t tell anybody about it.

He just fixed it.

With the powers he wasn’t supposed to be using.

xXx

It’s hard to say why exactly Jack did this.  This wasn’t like the first time around, with the systemic failure, but it _was_ an annoyance, and children have a tendency to do whatever it takes to ensure their own comfort.  Jack knew he could tap into his powers, and this seemed like such a small thing – why deal with a scratchy throat when he could just as easily get rid of it without having to worry about his soul?  This wouldn’t cause any damage.

It wouldn’t.

xXx

“Have you heard of Fantasy High?”

Jack tilts his head at Eliot as they’re packing up.  The latest battle had been intense – their adventure party had managed to escape the restaurant at the end of the universe after the brawl in a stolen ship, and were now cruising the galaxy looking for more adventures.  Jack was starting to get very involved in this story, and he’d taken to painting some of what he imagined the scenery to look like in his watercolor class, and his teacher praised him for being very creative. 

“What’s Fantasy High?”

“It’s a YouTube series,” Eliot explained, and Jack brightened.

“Like Crash Course?” He asked, and Eliot nodded fervently.

“Yeah!  Well, sorta.  I mean, they both have a lot of episodes, I guess?  I wouldn’t exactly call College Humor educational, but, like…they’re both funny.  Anyways, a bunch of people sit around playing DnD, and they go to this adventure academy where they’re, like, learning to become adventurers and they get into battles every other episode.  There’s only one season so far, but you should check it out.  You’d like it, and it’s totally helped me become a better player.”

That sure _sounded_ educational to Jack, if it helped him become a better player.  Maybe as good a player as Dean.

xXx

“I know we screwed up Christmas, so I thought we’d try and make up for it.”

Jack is beaming at the sleek new black keyboard on its stand in his room.  He’s already excited to set his books up on the music stand, and there’s a bunch of funny settings for it, like accordion, whatever the heck that is.  Sam said a real piano was a little bit expensive for them right now, and probably kinda hard to get into the bunker, but Jack didn’t care – he figured they were just about the same. 

“Thank you,” he says to Sam, and hugs the living daylights out of him.

xXx

“Jack?  Dude, c’mon!  It’s late, plug in some headphones and _then_ bang away on that thing, huh?”

xXx

He starts coughing again.

He fixes it.

xXx

“…it’s called Fantasy High, and it’s really cool.  You have to watch it, Dean.”

Dean snubs out his smoke and grabs his laptop, searches for it on YouTube.  Jack watches on expectantly.  Dean looks up at him.

“Wanna watch with me?”

xXx

Jack has to rewatch some episodes, but it’s worth it.  It’s worth sitting there breathing in Dean’s cigarette smoke.  He likes hanging out with Dean.  Dean – again – is _cool_.  Jack wants to be cool, too.

When they’ve watched the first two episodes, Sam knocks on Dean’s door and tells him he’s caught wind of a case down in Oklahoma that they should probably check out.  Cas is out helping Mary with something, and even though it means Jack has to stay home alone, Sam would rather he just stay.

“It’s nothing personal,” he tells Jack.  “You’ve gotten really good.  But you should stay home, work on your math, read your books, play your music,” Sam says, positively cheery.  Jack nods, but he’s a little upset, and he tries not to show it. 

“We’ll be back before ya know it,” Dean says, getting up and getting his stuff ready.  He glances at his brother, and Sam’s mouth flattens, silently conveying that he hopes this works, that he was right, that Jack really is distracted by learning all they can offer him that _isn’t_ hunting or hunting-adjacent. 

It seems to work.

xXx

It doesn’t go well.

Jack is sitting in the library, trying to understand how to find x while listening to a Crash Course about the Silk Road (Sam had said multitasking wasn’t really the best thing to do, but Jack liked having something on in the background anyways) when Sam and Dean burst through the front door, Dean hanging on to Sam as they stumble their way down the stairs.

“Jack!  Help!”

Jack runs to Sam’s aide and gets on Dean’s other shoulder as they carry him to the infirmary.  He doesn’t even have the time to ask what happened, if Cas is here, if they even finished the hunt.  They just get him laid out on one of the beds, and that’s when Jack notices that Dean is writhing in pain, or the Dean-version of writhing, which is a little more repressed, a little more stoic. 

“What happened?” Jack asks, the words tumbling quickly out of his mouth.  “A-a monster - ?”

“Nope.”  Sam is running around looking for bandages.  It’s Dean’s knee, Jack realizes, the left one, the bad one.  “On our way back, stopped at a gas station, some fucker out in the parking lot got the jump on him and stole his wallet.”

(There’s a lot Sam isn’t saying here.  He doesn’t tell Jack that Dean had sort of wandered away while the Impala was filling up, had his mind elsewhere, was focusing on the smoky burn filling his lungs instead of the visceral job that was burning the body of a freshly-dead child, laying in her coffin in a lily-white dress, face decomposing but head still full of strands of flaxen hair, and that’s where his mind was when some John fucking capped him and now he’s bleeding _every_ where – )

What happened next happened very quickly.  One second, Jack is staring down at Dean’s decimated knee, bruised and oozing blood and absolutely split open and he’s figuring that whoever did this really did a number on him, that Dean’s mind must have really been somewhere else for him to have let this happen, and _how_ could he have let this happen, and did he _let_ this happen, and _why_ would he let this happen –

And then Jack remembers coughing.

And without thinking about it, he reaches out and heals Dean.

xXx

“Jack – “

“I know.”

“No.  You _don’t_ ,” Sam says lowly.  “You can’t do that.  Ever.  Ever again.”

Jack gets it – Cas had this talk with him after Michael got trapped in Dean’s head (Dean, who is sleeping, or said he would be, watching Jack worriedly, warily, but his knee was fixed, even if he could still see  that little girl in her dress in the coffin.)  This is his soul, his life force, he needs it to not just stay alive but stay _himself_.  Got it.  

Cas was going to be disappointed in him.  He knew that.  And that hurt worse than him being angry.

xXx

“Sam?”

It’s late.  He’s woken Sam up.  But there was something eating at Jack, something he needed to admit to before the guilt gobbled him up from the inside out.  All he wanted was to help.  To be useful.  To be good.  Sam sits up, squinting at him.  “What’s up?”

Jack takes a deep breath, counts to ten as he lets it out slow.  “That wasn’t the only time I’ve used my powers lately.”

xXx

He explains the coughing.  There had only been a few times he had to take care of it, but he still felt like he should tell him. 

“It was annoying.  And I didn’t want to worry anybody.”

“I understand,” Sam said, running a hand sleepily through his hair and then down his face.  “But you can’t…you can’t do it anymore, Jack.  You can’t.”

“I won’t.”

That was sort of a lie.  A lie about intent.  Jack just didn’t know it yet.

xXx

Oh.  And on the subject of not keeping secrets:

“Can I tell you one more thing?”

“Go for it,” Sam sighed.  He sounded so tired.  

“The reason Dean and I come home late after piano isn’t because I’m staying after to practice but because we’re playing Dungeons and Dragons with some guys we met.”

Sam lets himself absorb this knowledge, and then he absolutely cracks up.

**VI.**

_“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!”_

Mark Twain, _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_

xXx

Jack sometimes wondered what it would be like for Dean when he got sick.

Right now, he seemed almost happy.  Getting out and doing something besides hunting and sitting around smoking and waiting to die had really done wonders for him, and they were all glad for it.  Sam, since Jack had told them their dirty little secret, now took every opportunity he had to call his brother a nerd, but he only directed the attacks at Dean, and Dean seemed to find them funny.  Jack would never tire of Dean showing him sets of die in all sorts of colors, and Jack in turn would show him his drawings of their characters.  Dean even hung some of them up on the fridge.

“It’s called bonding,” Jack overheard him saying to Cas and Sam.  “And just because it has nothing to do with y’all trying to give him an _education_ don’t mean it’s stupid.”

“I didn’t say that,” Sam said in confusion.  “I just said you’re nerds.”

xXx

But Jack kept thinking about how it wasn’t going to last forever.  Nothing did, he understood that, even better now than he used to, but he knew that one day, Dean would get so sick he wouldn’t even be able to get to the rec center or…or _any_ where to play, and he’d be too sick to do much of anything anyways.  Jack also couldn’t help but wonder if Dean wasn’t doing this because he actually wanted to, but because he was fitting in as much time as he could with Jack before…before.  And maybe that wasn’t the worst thing for Dean to pretend, but it would still make Jack feel kinda stupid, and then he’d be the nerd, wouldn’t he?

xXx

(Jack was a nerd anyway, but don’t tell him that.)

xXx

“What’re you working on?”

Initially, Jack doesn’t hear him.  He’s got his big headphones on and they’re plugged into his keyboard and Jack is banging away at his scales.  Dean’s not really a musician, but he can tell that he’s getting better.  His fingers look right, even if he’s slow.  Dean repeats, louder, _“What’re you working on?_ ” Even though he’s pretty sure he can tell.  Jack startles and looks up at him, then takes his headphones off and puts them around his neck. 

“Scales,” he tells him.  “And then” – he grabs his songbook and holds it up so Dean could see the song he’s working on – “’Simple Gifts.’”

“Ah,” Dean nods.  “Well, I was gonna go watch the next episode of Fantasy High, so….”  Dean trails off, suddenly feeling stupid.  “Nevermind.”

Dean wanted to both thank and throttle Jack for healing him.  It was just his knee, just his _stupid_ knee, and wasn’t worth it.  But he’d done it anyway.  Sam had apparently talked about it with him, and Cas had done so, too, once he’d gotten back, and they both said that Jack said he wasn’t going to do it again, but Dean wasn’t sure he could believe that.  Kids lie.

xXx

Adults lie, too.

xXx

“Sometimes I wonder if I could get rid of Michael.  With my powers.  Kick him out of your head.”

Dean falters.  They’re on their way home from another D&D battle in which Lander had valiantly revived Milo and brought him back from the dead after he’d been shot in the heart by a space smuggler’s ray-gun (Bill really was a dork of a completely different class), and they’d been reliving it when they hit a lull, and now for something completely different. 

“Not how this one’s gonna go down, kid,” Dean replies.  “You shouldn’t worry about it.”

That was the first lie.

“But I just…I wonder if I could.  You know?”

“I guess.  But, Jack…” He glances at this sweet kid next to him, and ‘sweet’ is not a word he uses.  “This life…this _game_ has rules.  Just like math.  Ya know?  And sometimes…sometimes you gotta play by ‘em.  Ya gotta know when to say enough is enough and stop raging against the machine.”

“So…you’re really okay with this?” Jack asks.  “I know you said you are, but are you really?  Are you really that tired?”

Dean really _was_ that tired.

He really, really was.

“Yeah.  Yeah, kid, I’m okay with this.”

That was the second lie.

xXx

“What’s been your favorite book so far?”

Jack and Cas were on one of their walks.  Spring was a beautiful time of year, Earth coming back to life, and it meant that Jack’s birthday was coming up, which he was _very_ excited about.  He’d been in apocalypse world for his first birthday, which was sort of a bummer, so this one had to be better.  Right?  “I really liked _Little Women_.  It made me think of…us.”

Cas gave a confused smile.  “How so?  I thought it was a book about…well, women.”

“Well, there’s four of us, and four of them.  And it’s almost like together, they’re one person.  I don’t know.  That’s just what it makes me think of.  How when we’re all together, it’s like everything clicks.”

“I guess it does.  ‘Click’, that is,” Cas agrees.  “We are better together, I do agree with that.”

“I wish you’d let me hunt more.”  Jack looks up at Cas, who is looking straight ahead as they walk through the old farm fields.  “I think I know what you’re doing,” he said, and Cas stopped to look at him.  “You guys are trying to make me focus on other stuff than hunting.  Like books and math and learning piano.”

Cas didn’t say anything for a moment, but then he sighed.  “Yes, I suppose you’re onto us.  We’re worried, Jack.  After Michael, and the few times after that, we just…we want you to be you.  And the benefit of all of this is that it makes you an even better you.  And you’re already wonderful,” Cas tried to smile, but Jack didn’t return the favor.

“I wish you would have just told me.  I can handle it.”

Cas raised a brow.  “Can you?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he said somewhat testily.  Jack was getting flustered.  “All adults say the same things.  They say that you have to keep practicing things to get good at them even if you don’t like them because you just _have_ to be good at stupid math, and they all lie.  I’m sick of it.”

That was the rub. 

xXx

And math.  Math was also the rub.  Jack was just being nice to Dean because he was going to die horribly one day, so he figured he owed him, but he was tired of it.  He liked playing Dungeons and Dragons with him – he didn’t like learning from him.  Because, as Jack was realizing, what he was learning from Dean wasn’t math. 

It was that he was good at lying. 

Yes, he was good at RPGs and fixing cars and cooking and was apparently a great bowler even though Jack had never had this proven to him, but he was best at lying.  He told Jack to lie about what they did after his piano class, and he lied about being okay with how he was going to die, and that, Jack believed was the worst lie of all.

Dean thought all of this was okay.  He thought that things would just be _okay_ after he was gone, that the way in which he was going to die would make all of this okay because it would get rid of Michael, but he didn’t seem to care about what it was going to do to the people around him.

xXx

Jack then resolved to do two things:

  1. Solve a case by himself so he could stick it to his dads because _yes_.
  2. Learn more about lung cancer.



xXx

This all required a lot of time on the computer. 

Jack figured the cancer part would be easiest.  He just googled “lung cancer” and that got him millions of hits.  The Mayo Clinic said it was a type of cancer that began in the lungs, could apparently spread, was the leading cancer death in both men and women, especially smokers, and led to coughing up blood and losing weight and chest pain.  Jack also found a bunch of websites where people who knew other people with lung cancer would talk about it with each other, talking about how hard it was watching someone get so sick and go through some scary-sounding treatment called radiation, which sounded pretty bad to Jack. 

He slowly realized that all of these things were going to happen to Dean.

xXx

It was easier, somehow, to face the werewolf den he found outside of town than it was to face the fact that Dean’s lungs were going to become shriveled up and black by his own hand.

xXx

Sneaking out of the bunker was easy enough.  All Jack had to do was wait until Sam and Dean were asleep and Cas had wandered out of the front rooms during his nightly, hours-long walkabout.  It’s just that Jack got his timing off and ultimately failed in even getting out the front door.

“Going somewhere?”

Jack was at the top of the stairs when Cas’s voice startled him into whipping around and stuttering, trying and failing to explain himself.  “Uh.  No?”

Cas wasn’t amused.  “Funny, how you say that all adults do is lie, when it seems you yourself are fully willing and capable to do the same.  Come down here.  We’re going to talk about this.”

xXx

Sam and Dean weren’t so happy about once again being woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a Jack-related issue.  Jack was sitting at one of the library tables, his fathers standing over him looking in turns disappointed and angry and the back to disappointed and also very, very tired.  Jack was good at exhausting them all, it seemed.

“Where were you going?” Sam asked.

“And don’t lie,” Cas reminded.

“I found a hunt.  I was going to take care of it.”

“Alone?” Dean asked.

“Yes.”

“How?” Sam asked.

“How else do you kill werewolves?”

“As we’ve seen, there’s more than just the usual way, at least for you,” Cas said.  “So which was it?”

Jack blinked.

“Bullets or your powers, kid,” Dean drawled sleepily.

“Both were options,” he admitted sheepishly.

All three of his fathers sighed in unison.

xXx

“What are we doing about this?”

Dean pulled his robe around him tighter.  It was too late…or, maybe too early for this bullshit.  “I don’t know.  Wait.  Wait, we need to ask him why.”

xXx

“Hey, Jack?”

Jack was still sitting in the same chair, seemingly unmoving, looking pouty.  “What?”

“ _Why_ did you decide to do this?”

“Because you all lied to me.”

“Oh.”

xXx

“He says we all lied to him.”

Cas rolled his eyes.  “Lying seems to be a big thing for him.  He doesn’t understand what we’re doing here, that what we’re _trying_ to do – “

“Maybe it’s not really working,” Sam admitted.  “He still wants to hunt.  Maybe it worked for a while, but whatever the hell he means by saying we’re all lying to him, it’s got him pissed.  So.  I guess we just…let him hunt?”

“ _Or_ ,” a new voice cut in, “you can just do what I tell you to.”

xXx

Billie – always popping in at the best worst times.  “Hey, Billie,” Dean greeted.  He was getting used to her visits, but usually, she only came to see him.  “What now?”

Sam eyed her warily as she stepped forward.  “I eavesdrop sometimes.  And I feel like I should tell you I’ve foreseen something.”

“You can do that?” Sam asked.  She tilted her head at him.

“Foresight’s kind of my thing.  I know how every soul on Earth is conceivably going to die, every possibility.  I’m here to ensure your brother’s path to the afterlife goes smoothly.”

“And what would that entail?” Cas asked, eyebrows narrowed.

“Glad ya asked.  Has to do with that boy of yours.  In a few weeks’ time, this hunting bug that’s bit him is going to come across a case concerning a demigod, and it’s not going to end _well_.  It ends with him killing Michael – “

“Great!”

“…and burning off his soul, and then somehow worse than that.  You don’t want that to happen, and not just for the obvious reasons.”

“What are the…not-obvious reasons?” Sam asked oh-so-eloquently.

Billie shakes her head.  “You don’t want to know.  Let me take care of it.  For once, I’m doing what I can to prevent that weight from being placed upon your shoulders.  But you need to do something about Jack.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

She nodded.  “I do.  You’re going to need to call up that red-headed witch.”

**VII.**

_“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.”_

Margaret Mitchell, _Gone with the Wind_

xXx

Rowena arrived in all her finery, and at first, Jack was excited to see her. 

But then a woman all in black appeared, and he wasn’t so excited.

xXx

“Who are you?” Jack asked.

“I am Death,” she said.  “But you can call me Billie.”

Something cold settled in Jack’s stomach.  He swallowed.  “Why are you here?”

“To stop you from doing a lot of damage,” she answered, but not unkindly.  Jack had expected Death to be scary, but Billie, while intimidating, was looking at him with soulful eyes.  “Both to yourself and the universe.”

Oof.  The universe.  That was sort of a big thing.

“What have I done?” He asked shakily, looking to Rowena, who put her hand on his arm and started guiding him to the infirmary.  They passed Sam and Dean and Cas in the hallway, all three of them looking serious, but not sad.  But maybe a bit scared.  They didn’t say anything as the three of them passed, but watched closely, and Billie waved the door shut behind them.

“Nothing yet,” Billie explained, as Rowena sat Jack down and started preparing for probably a spell.  “But I’m a bit worried.  We’re here to help you, Jack.”  Billie explained to him what was about to happen, that this was for the good of the universe, and that if he did his small part, like Dean, it would do a lot of good, and at the end of the day, he would be very happy.

“What do you mean by that?” Jack asked warily, full of questions, especially after Billie had relayed her plan.  Apparently, his fathers were okay with this.  He wanted to trust them, and he did.  But he was scared by this. 

“It means, that if you do this, I foresee good things for you.  You do not want to anger God, Jack.”

_God?_ What did God have to do with any of this.  “Have I?  Angered God?”

“Not yet,” she shrugged.  “But you have scared him.  And that’s almost worse.  Lucky for me, God doesn’t scare me, so I got no problem standing between you and him, even if you are helping me.”

None of this made sense.  And it was making him very sad.  “But…but that means I won’t get to read _Frankenstein!_ This means that I won’t ever get to go on hunts or-or go on walks with Cas anymore!”  Jack’s face crumpled, and Rowena’s eyes turned sad as she watched him, readying her spell.  “It means that I won’t get to find out what happens to Lander and Milo in the campaign, and that Dean’s going to…going to die.”

“Of course Dean is going to die.  But you’ll get to have all of those things, Jack.  With time.  With time, you’ll have everything you have now and more.”

Jack swallowed roughly.  “Is that a promise?”

“It is.”  She looked to Rowena.  “Do it.  Now.”

Rowena took a breath.  “Don’t be scared, Jack.”  She tried to smile at him.  “Growing up is a wonderful thing.”

The last coherent thought Jack had before Rowena cast her spell was that he hoped she wasn’t lying.

**Author's Note:**

> All of this stream-of-consciousness will be explained in the next part. It will all be revealed. And it will all come back.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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